Many times a week we get emails from SEO link spamming bunnies asking us to add links to Reg stories, often many years old. We always say no - and mark as spam.
Some get it hilariously wrong: here is an example from today’s mail-bag, inspired by our August 2016 article entitled "Little ARMs pump 2,048-bit muscles in training …

Twitter today confirmed recent press reports that it is reducing headcount by 9 per cent – about 350 people – in an attempt to become profitable in 2017.
The company generated $616m in revenues in Q3 2016 yet still managed to chalk up $515m in costs and an operating loss of $78m. So what exactly does the company that no one …

Misys has scrapped plans to IPO, blaming market conditions. Earlier this month, the UK banking software vendor announced its intention to returned to the London Stock Exchange four years after it was bought by a private equity firm, Vista Equity Partners, for £1.3bn.
In a terse note the company claimed "encouraging …

Fujitsu is in talks with Lenovo to offload its PC arm to its Chinese rival.
If the talks are successful, Fujitsu will continue to sell and support own-brand PCs, designed and made by Lenovo.
The two companies are looking to the Development Bank of Japan to bankroll the deal.
Fujitsu is currently the 10th biggest PC …

Misys, the banking software firm, is returning to the London Stock Exchange four years after it was bought by a private equity firm. The company aims to raise £500m at a price valuing it at £5.5bn.
Since delisting in 2012, Misys has restructured and merged with Turaz, the former risk management software division of Thomson …

We are indebted to "Lourdes" for this tweet.
Omfg I'm at Home Depot and someone put pornhub on this refrigerator pic.twitter.com/BJgIOORZqC
— Lourdes (@gossipgriII) September 29, 2016
The internet of fridges, huh!
Head over to the comments to make your caption suggestion. ®
President Lisa Simpson face palm

IBM has appointed HCL, the Indian tech outsourcing giant, to take over development of several middleware software brands, including Tivoli Workload Scheduler and a bunch of Rational products.
The deal sees an unspecified number of IBM developers and support staff transferred to HCL (PDF). ®
IBM Headquarters, Armonk, NY

The two warring factions called Arduino are joining forces once again. Arduino LLC and Arduino sri, a breakaway outfit set up by Gianluca Martino, an Arduino co-founder, are to combine distribution of the boards beloved by hardware hackers everywhere, in a new company called Arduino Holdings.
They are hiving off responsibility …

Cloud computing is so mainstream these days that maybe it should just be called “computing”. That’s what an IDC survey of 6,100 organisations in 31 countries, released today, indicates, with 68 per cent of respondents using public, private or hybrid cloud in their IT mix. This is a 60 per cent jump from 42 per cent of …

Vodafone blocked 425,000 nuisance and scam calls in a single day, while testing new call-barring technology for its UK mobile network.
And during a week of tests, nuisance and fraudulent call attempts plummeted to less than 1000 as the bad guys realised that Vodafone could and would block their calls.
Success. The new, …

Opera went live today with a VPN embedded into its desktop browser. Described as “free, no-log and easy to use,” the VPN uses 256-bit AES encryption to connect to one of Opera’s five data centres.
With this move, Opera gives a fillip to those who need or want their online privacy. It is also a warning shot across the bows of …

Got a Samsung Galaxy Note 7 and live in the UK or Ireland? Not switched it on lately after reading those reports about exploding devices? Fret ye not, for Samsung today announced an exchange programme, whereby you get a replacement “phablet” courtesy of the provider you bought it from.
In the meantime, Samsung requests that “ …

Not so long ago you could barely move on Facebook for all the exquisitely crafted beheading videos. Now you can’t even watch a cute cat video – if your first name is Isis, anyway.
Spare a thought for Isis Thomas, a 27 year-old from Bristol, who found this out when she was locked out of her Facebook account.
Isis has fired off …

A West Midlands man who bought gun parts on the so-called Dark Web has been sentenced to 10 months in prison.
Moynul Haque, 21, paid about £900 in Bitcoins for the slide, barrel and recoil spring of a Glock 9mm pistol.
The unnamed seller hid the parts in an antique radio and posted it to Haque from an address in Michigan. …

Bacon infused vodka may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but selling this improbable beverage in Oklahoma could land you in hot water.
This we learned today from the woes of Colin Grizzle - yes, really - a manager at the Pump bar in Oklahoma city, who was charged with maintaining a disorderly house after bottles of infused vodka …

Once upon a decade ago, green computing was a big thing. Nowadays it is an actual thing, thanks to the usual suspects: virtualization and cloud computing.
Take for example, the United States' data centres: collectively they chewed up about 70 billion kWH in 2014, about 1.8 per cent of total US consumption, according to a June …

Plusnet is cranking up download speeds from 38Mb to 52Mb for Unlimited Fibre broadband customers. But there’s a sting in the tail, as upload speed is reduced from "up to 19Mb" to "up to 9.4Mb". The changes take effect on August 1, and a month later the BT-owned ISP is raising prices all round on September 1, 2016.
There is a …

Acer is lending StarBreeze, a Swedish games studio, $9m through a bond issue to help develop a virtual reality head-mounted display. The Taiwanese PC maker is also setting up a JV with Starbreeze to bring the StarVR to market ®.
Jason Chen, Acer CEO shakes hands with Starbreeze exec

BT has been fined £500,000 and ordered to pay costs of £98,913.51 after one of its engineers broke both ankles after falling seven metres from a loft onto a concrete stairwell.
David Spurgeon was fixing a telephone fault in the roof void of a block of flats in Bow, east London, when he lost his balance and plunged through the …

Uber is trialling helicopter taxi flights in Sao Paolo, Brazil’s biggest city, which is notorious for road traffic gridlocks.
The ride-hailing firm has teamed up with three local helicopter firms to offer on-demand flights between four airports and five helipads in the city. With promotional prices starting at $19 a seat, Uber …

Blue Coat has scrapped its IPO plans in favour of a $4.65bn takeover by IT security rival Symantec.
Greg Clark, Blue Coat CEO, will take the helm at Symantec, so resolving the question of succession of Mike Brown, who announced his resignation as CEO in April.
On a pro-forma basis, the combined company would have $4.4bn in …

Dell had an unremarkable Q1 of fiscal 2017, with its parent Denali Holding Inc today reporting revenues down 2 per cent year on the year to $12.5bn, but greatly reduced operating losses, trimmed 52 per cent from $335m to $161m.
The company burned through $63m in cash in the three months ended April 29 but this pointed to " …

Ubiquitous youth hook-up app, Tinder, is banning under-18s from using its service.
Currently, self-declared teenagers between 13-17 are ring-fenced from adults in their own dating community, some 3 million strong. That is easy enough to shut down.
With this decision, Tinder aims to head off the inevitable legal spats for …

Emirates has appointed IBM to run various technology services in a 10-year deal worth $300m.
The contract sees the airline using IBM mainframes and storage on a managed services basis and will enable it to improve efficiency for passenger support systems and gain significant operational savings, IBM said in a statement today …

A pause in hyper-scale deployments has triggered the first year-on-year decline in seven quarters for global server shipments and revenues.
Also a “clear end to the enterprise refresh cycle” contributed to the Q1, 2016 slow down, according to IDC, the tech market watcher.
In essence, Q1 2015 revenues were flattered by a major …